On Aug.31, Alterman noted, D’Souza tweeted that he thought it would be “interesting to see” Soros “extradited to Israel & tried for his complicity in Nazi atrocities against Jews.”

Alterman said D’Souza, who he termed a "convicted felon and right-wing provocateur," had also told a conservative talk-show host that he was “delighted to uncover” Soros’s history.

Actually, Alterman said, Soros was just a 14-year-old boy in Budapest who survived the Holocaust because he was hidden by a government official who had a Jewish wife. Soros’s father helped protect the Jewish woman, and in return the official agreed to let Soros pretend to be his Christian godson.

Once, when the official was sent to inventory the estate of a Jewish family, the boy accompanied him rather than be left alone in Budapest for three days.

That innocent episode alone, which was detailed in Michael Kaufman’s 2002 book "Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire," has been the basis of the hyperbolic right-wing attacks on Soros, Alterman said.

Alterman said D’Souza's claim was old news, having already been made by Glenn Beck, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Alex Jones, and Tony Blankley (who he said retracted it after being asked to back it up).

Perhaps most shamefully, Alterman said, former New Republic owner and editor Marty Peretz called Soros “a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel.”

Alterman said the Soros slander appeared to derive from a "60 Minutes" interview by Steve Kroft who exaggerrated the wartime claim, so flummoxing Soros "by the moral and intellectual imbecility" of the inquiry that he offered a stumbling response that failed to clarify the truth.

Alterman also said D’Souza thinks that “former Nazi collaborator George Soros should be investigated as a sponsor of domestic terrorism” for his alleged sponsorship of antifa, but neither Soros nor his foundations support antifa in any way.